Aura of Decay is disappointing. I want a powerful death aura around me, not something I need to constantly micromanage. My suggestion is two-fold…
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Remove the infinitely scaling rate increase of self-harm. There’s no reason to force people to disable their aura and wait, and disabling it harms the player beyond simply “not having damage temporarily”. We lose all kinds of resistance, and are at our most vulnerable with it off.
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Add spell scaling or cast speed scaling, either cooked in or via a skill node. This would allow players to utilize Aura of Decay without hyper-specializing in poison to get any benefit at all from it.
As things stand, poison is more detrimental to players than monsters, so the self-harm scaling on Aura of Decay is insane. Needing to disable an AURA skill is counter-intuitive to begin with, but feels doubly bad when that aura is both your damage AND the thing keeping you from offing yourself with your own aura (you lose damage, healing and resistance when disabled). Unscaled poison is largely ineffective, making Aura of Decay a poor choice for spellcasters that aren’t purely poison invested.
I feel like Decay Lich fantasy should involve being a stinky undead poison caster, but instead we’re playing “Aura Management Simulator”, which is kind of awful.
I’m sad this hasn’t changed since launch.